Would 'Rathergate' Make a Good Movie? Hollywood Insiders Working on Screen Adaptation
The Media Mob has learned that a team of Hollywood insiders is currently working on a screen adaptation of Truth And Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power—the 2005 book by former CBS News producer Mary Mapes, in which she defends the 60 Minutes II story by Dan Rather about President George W. Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard, which ran on CBS in September 2004 and eventually led to her ouster from the network.
Who would want to turn "Rathergate" into a feature-length film?
According to sources familiar with the situation, Producer Mikkel Bondesen, (his credits include serving as executive producer on the USA Network series "Burn Notice") is actively working on the adaptation with screenwriter James Vanderbilt.
Mr. Vanderbilt wrote the screenplay for the 2007 serial killer movie Zodiac—based on the nonfiction book by Robert Graysmith—and is currently writing the screenplay for Spider-Man 4.
In the book, Ms. Mapes was highly critical of how her bosses at CBS and Viacom handled the aftermath of the wildly controversial story about President Bush's military service. Along the way, she lays much of the groundwork for what could be a juicy White House conspiracy thriller.
"Money is the master," wrote Ms. Mapes. "That is the bottom line to what happened at CBS that fateful fall when we aired a story that, like all stories, was imperfect, but was absolutely grounded in fact. It was well researched and well documented. But when Viacom saw that the story was not well received and that a conservative firestorm was threatening the corporation's financial well-being, their collective wallets started itching. As a result, I believe CBS News, 60 Minutes, Dan Rather, and journalism itself got badly scratched."
(Mr. Rather is currently making similar charges in Manhattan court in a $70 million civil suit against his former employers, in part, for their handling of the aftermath of the story.)
"This was a corporate, political, and public relations operation, designed to take the heat off and allow Viacom to walk away unscathed, unencumbered by lingering anger from the White House or the various Republican-dominated committees that the corporation lobbied constantly," added Ms. Mapes.
It remains to be seen how much of the screenplay will be dedicated to the alleged bungling of the story and its aftermath at CBS versus the broader story of the President's military service.
When reached by phone on Monday afternoon, Ms. Mapes declined to comment. The Media Mob has a phone call in to Mr. Bondesen. We'll update if we hear back.
No word yet on who might play Mr. Rather if the script ever makes it to production. This wouldn't be the first film made about internal drama at CBS News: In 1999, Michael Mann directed The Insider, an account of 60 Minutes and its struggle with tobacco company Brown & Williamson. That movie was nominated for seven Oscars, including for Best Actor and Best Director.
When reading stuff like this, you really get the feeling hollywood and cbs deserves to go out of business. Rather and others refuse to accept the fact the memo was fake.
I wonder if they're going to accurately portray the forged service documents that thier document "expert" verified - over the phone......
See the memo for yourself.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=17439
This movie needs to be made. Too bad few realize how their lives and thoughts are controlled by the corporation that rules America.
Mary Mapes like all liberals is clueless.
The dimbuld believes that her story is the issue. It isn't.
She says her story was factual. Yet the only evidence presented to support the non-story was fraudulent. This liberal hack is so deluded that she can't smell her own stench.
Mapes, your papers were fraudulent. Using fraudulent documents in a hit piece IS THE ISSUE. You have ZERO credibility. The humorous part of all this, is that Mapes and Rather pissed all over themselves, and they tell us it's not piss, it's rain water.
Mapes, Rather and CBS don't care if the documents were fake. They don't care that they ran with fraudulent papers and got caught. They work backwards. George Bush is bad, and to prove he's bad, we'll come up with a story showing our opinion. We don't need to VET any documents, because EVERYBODY KNOWS that George Bush is bad. It was election time, we'll just slime George Bush, BECAUSE HE IS BAD, and later when it becomes obvious that we used FRAUDULENT DOCUMENTS, we'll just say, that US USING FRAUDULENT DOCUMENTS isn't bad, because our intentions were good!
We don't need to be honest. We're the good guys. We're liberals. Everyone knows that!
Sorry, but you guys are morons. Mapes and her people made a botch of fully authenticating the memos, but the documents were only a small part of the entire 12 1/2 minute segment -- they were really literally a last minute add-on to an interview with former Texas lieutenant governor Ben Barnes (the report aired on Sept. 8, 2004, and she had only obtained the documents just a few days earlier, some on Sept. 2 and the rest on Sept. 5). Barnes had also been the Speaker of the Texas House at the time of the Vietnam War. Barnes use to help the kids of the influential and wealthy get into the Texas Guard and out of harm's way in Vietnam, and one of those kids was Bush. This all came out in an unrelated court case.
But if Mapes and her people made mistakes in their rush to add the memos to the story, the rest of the media became a train wreck in "covering" the forgery charges brought up by malicious and/or utterly clueless right wing bloggers. Proportional printing was not only common in 1972-73, but MOST of the few military/government memos you can find on the internet (memos are not "official" records and so are not normally archived unless they were classified) from that time and even earlier are also proportionally printed. Indeed even one of Bush's official records "IS" proportionally printed -- only it wasn't released by the DoD until Sept. 24, 2004, long, long after all of the records were suppose to have been released, and just after CBS had backed away from the story. But did anyone notice? And did anyone notice how Bush's flight records completely supported the memo dated Feb 2, 1972, which showed Killian being concerned about Bush's flight certification/qualification? No? Then it's even more likely that nobody noticed how the flight records were also very belatedly released by the DoD -- Sept, 7, 2004, just a day before CBS aired the story.
The less dumb out there should notice a funky, not so little issue here: if Mapes had obtained all of the memos by Sept. 5, 2004, then how would anyone have been able able to forge the Feb. 2, 1972 memo if the only source of information about Bush's flight performance, the flight logs, were not released until a few days later on Sept 7? Especially since they apparently were never ever publicly available before then?
Because they weren't forged anymore than the moon landings were staged. Any sort of non-braindead research into the tech features of common office equipment at the time, as well as any serious analysis of the degree of content matching to office DoD records would have kept the forgery charges as being more than another "MSM" bashing exercise by nutcase bloggers.
Maybe the "MSM" should be bashed, severely, but not exactly for the reasons usually offered up by those of right wing dementia....
It would make a great cartoon, since this asshole is a cartoon character in human form.
I'm sure plenty of the upper west side loons would love an ode to their guru of spin and bullshit.
Nobody west of Joisey would spend a penny to see anything other than this jerks funeral.
I hope they invest lots of money in this movie and hire high profile actors/actresses. It will lose millions and that is what I would enjoy seeing most. Hollywood (and Mapes) out of touch with reality. This movie will be a spectacular flop.
I know Rathergate was a gotcha moment for CBS- and MSM-haters, so I don't expect them to welcome any revisiting of the story. But didn't the National Guard employee who said the memo CBS attributed to her was a forgery GO ON to say that the CONTENT of that memo was the same as the one she did write, virtually word for word? If so, where does that leave the (more important?) question of George W. Bush's National Guard record? And what does it suggest about the origin of the forged documents?
They should re-name the movie "Truth and Dooty" because its a bunch of crap.
BC - The documents WERE the story, because they were the only coroberative evidence to back up Barnes.
Barnes had many times in the past stated that there was no quid pro quo, and that no intervention was needed, because the Texas air gaurd was BELOW it's quata for qualified fighter pilots - then in 2004 just before an election he changes his mind? Why, would he have to interveine, to get Bush into a program that was in need of more applicants???
Even members of Barnes's own family came out afterward and said that what he said in the 60 minutes interview was contridictory to what he had told them, and politically motivated (he was wanting a position in the Kerry administration).
And the Mapes and Rather wanted to protray Bush as coward who didn't want to go to Vietnam - why the heck did he become an f102 pilot? That's not really the safest position in the military!
Liberals have ZERO regaurd for the truth! The ends (as they see them) always outweigh the means!
Ok BC, if you beleive that the documents are authentic - even after any unbiased, intelligent, and sane person can clearly see that they were created using MS Word (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=17439) - you are not only a moonbat, you're a nut!
Everyone...some points you may want to consider...answers that GWB never will...why didn't he pee into the jar? Where are his military records? What happened to them? Why did he miss his physical? What was the liklihood of a air guardsmen being called up and sent to Vietnam? For those who didn't have the opportunity of going to Vietnam...the only answer is not a ghost's chance in hell. In 1972 the military instituted urine analysis testing for recruits, officers, and even GIs being sent to Vietnam. It was obvious why GWB failed to take the test. More troubling, where did his records go? What happened to them? How often did he drill with his unit? If he failed to drill with his unit, as it appeared that he did, then why was he awarded a honorable discharge? There is a name for what he did...it is either AWOL, or worse, desertion. For all the sunshine patriots...that is synamous with being a coward in anyone's lexicon.
Sorry, but you guys attacking me aren't getting it. For instance, why didn't Charles Johnson of LGF show only the results of overlaying the shortest of the 4 memos CBS used, the CYA one? Because that trick doesn't work with the other memos, especially the two longer ones. Like this for instance:
http://aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/MiscScans/Aug1-1972Ani.gif
Compare that to this section of a 1973 document, a draft of a press release for a word processor (yes they had word processors back then) overlaid with Arial Bold (which technically didn't even exist then):
http://aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/MiscScans/RedactorPressRelease.gif
Also, for all the supposed "experts" brought out by the media and that bogus Thornburgh/Boccardi, none were really document forensics experts. For grins, go Google: Scientific Examination of Questioned Documents Hilton
The first hit should be the entire book online in "Google Books" -- go start reading at about the middle of page 48 on, and perhaps ask yourselves, "Why am I only just learning about this stuff, and from some random dude on the internet?"
And this doesn't even touch the content issues, which in total simply cannot be explained by the supposed forger working from available DoD records.
While I'm not exactly hoping for much from this supposed movie thing (Mapes's book is actually pretty lacking in important evidence and research), Rather's lawsuit has stirred up some journalistic curiosity, however very much belatedly. We shall see, though....
HEH
Paranoia will destroy ya.
/chuckle.
How again was this supposed to help me in 2004???
A DUI report the Friday before the election in 2000 didn't kill GW Bush, what makes people thinks this would have?
I made a big deal about my Vietnam record when maybe I shouldn't have. Notice how Gore did not play up his 'journalistic' roll in Vietnam during the 2000 election. I should have paid attention.
Dan Rather deserves liquidation.
Paging Lucy Ramirez! There is a man named BC in the lobby waiting to speak with you.
Now, now....don't be rude just because some of the stuff I pointed out requires some reading and thinking skills beyond that of a 5th grader....